Organizations often maintain thousands of documents of different types, such as letters, internal memorandums, presentations, or various forms particular to an organization's business. These organizations also often include many divisions, regions, or lines of business (“LOBs”), each including hundreds if not thousands of employees. Each of these divisions, regions, or LOBs may have a unique way of generating documents due to the characteristics particular to the them. Further, individual employees may generate documents differently due to their particular tastes, styles, and level of expertise. Additionally, familiarity with the various tools and nuances of document generating applications, such as Microsoft Powerpoint™, Word™, Excel™, etc., vary between users, creating even more inconsistencies between documents. (Microsoft Powerpoint, Word, and Excel are trademarks of the Microsoft Corporation.)
While some of these differences between documents are necessary, it is important that all documents in an organization have a similar appearance. For one reason, if a set of document formatting protocols are implemented within an organization, employees have to spend less time deciding how to format their documents, thereby increasing productivity. Further, if all documents are similar in appearance, the organization gives the impression to its customers that it is unified and well organized.
Although the benefits of having a document formatting protocol are clear, managing the many templates that implement the formatting protocol is a more difficult proposition. Conventional techniques for managing an organization's templates are largely informal. For instance, one technique is to find a previous document of the same type, such as a previous letter, duplicate it, and modify its content to fit the current situation. However, this technique assumes that the previous document had the correct formatting, which is not always the case.
Another approach is to manually create actual document templates, store them on a network accessible computer, and allow employees to access a desired template and save it to a new file for content editing. However, this approach is time inefficient in that the document templates must each individually be created, and is storage inefficient in that complete documents must be stored for each template. Further, this approach is one-dimensional in that it provides only a single list of document templates, and does not account for organization-wide formatting protocols and regional-specific formatting protocols.
Accordingly, a need in the art exists for an efficient document template management system that realizes the productivity, customer-confidence, and cost-savings benefits of uniform document appearance and functionality across an organization.